'City Smells'

Making Perfume from the Urban Landscape

When walking through a city, do you notice every time the smell changes and where one smell stops and the next starts? Our olfactory system is our first sense to develop as well as the most sensitive of our senses. Its responses to our surroundings can provoke powerful emotional reactions, vivid memory retrieval and can even affect our behavior. The urban landscape, with its denseness of variety, presents a myriad of smells which bombard us with airborne chemicals as we traverse its spaces.

'City Smells' began with short introductions atArt Space IAa followed by a guided walk through the local neighborhood where participants were asked to collect plant samples which would later be turned into perfumes. Participants bent over, reached up and grabbed flora along the tour, rubbing and smelling things as they went in order to make their own collection defined by the city itself. Some of the commonly available neighborhood plants in proximity to the workshop's are mugwort, rosemary, Chinese juniper, and mint. At the end of the guided walk, participants were brought to an old schoolhouse nearby for directions on how to create their perfumes as well as space to work. In transforming their collections into perfumes, participants recreated portions of the city as bottled and exaggerated odors that can then be used at will, allowing the smeller to virtually transport themself back to the source.